Last reviewed: February 2026

Keyword Research for Law Firms Isn’t Generic SEO

A personal injury firm in Phoenix spent four months producing blog content around “legal advice” and “how to find a lawyer.” The pages ranked nowhere. Meanwhile, a two-attorney practice across town targeted “motorcycle accident attorney Phoenix” and “Maricopa County wrongful death lawyer” and signed three new cases in the first quarter from organic alone.

Budget, domain authority, content volume — none of it mattered. Keyword selection did. And keyword selection for law firms operates on a fundamentally different logic than what most SEO guides teach.

Practice Area, Location, and Intent Are the Only Variables That Matter

General SEO advice tells you to start with search volume. Find the highest-volume keyword, build content around it, rank, collect traffic. That works when you sell software or running shoes. It collapses when you sell legal services, because legal services are local, specific, and high-stakes by nature.

Three variables determine whether a keyword is worth targeting for a law firm: practice area, location granularity, and intent.

Practice area defines the content universe. “Criminal defense” and “estate planning” are not interchangeable audiences. The searcher who types “DUI lawyer” has different urgency, emotional state, and decision timeline than someone typing “living trust attorney.”

Keyword research that ignores this and starts from generic seeds like “lawyer” or “legal help” produces pages that attract everyone and convert no one.

Location granularity changes viability. “Personal injury lawyer” nationally is a keyword with enormous volume and functionally zero chance of ranking for a local firm. “Personal injury lawyer Tampa” is competitive but winnable with strong on-page and local signals. “Personal injury lawyer Hillsborough County” might have a fraction of the volume, but the person typing it is looking for someone who practices in their jurisdiction. For firms outside top-10 metros, county-level and neighborhood-level targeting is often where the real opportunity sits.

Intent modifiers separate researchers from buyers. “How to file for divorce” is informational. The searcher needs answers but is not ready to hire. “Divorce lawyer near me” is transactional. The searcher has already decided to hire someone and is choosing who. “Divorce lawyer cost” sits in between, a commercial query where the searcher is evaluating options. Each intent type maps to a different page type and a different conversion expectation. Treating them identically wastes both content resources and ranking potential.

If you run a mid-size firm with three practice areas and two office locations, this framework alone narrows your keyword universe from thousands of generic terms to maybe 150 high-value targets. That is a much more actionable starting point.

What Legal Clients Actually Type

Legal clients do not search like marketers assume they do. They rarely use the formal terminology you put on your website. The gap between how a lawyer describes their services and how a potential client searches for them is a persistent keyword research failure in the legal vertical — and one that rarely gets fixed.

Criminal defense attorneys build pages around “felony defense representation.” Their potential clients type “what happens if I get charged with a felony” or “can I go to jail for a first DUI.” Family law attorneys optimize for “dissolution of marriage.” Their clients search “how to get divorced in Texas” or “do I need a lawyer for custody.”

Modifier patterns shift dramatically across practice areas. Personal injury searches skew toward incident type: “car accident lawyer,” “slip and fall attorney,” “truck crash lawsuit.” Criminal defense searches skew toward charge type and consequence: “drug possession lawyer,” “will I go to jail for.” Family law searches skew toward process and cost: “how much does divorce cost,” “custody lawyer fees.” Corporate and business law searches skew toward task: “LLC formation lawyer,” “business partnership agreement attorney.”

Voice search compounds this gap. As of Q4 2025, voice queries tend to be longer and more conversational, according to Google’s own documentation on how search works. Someone speaking to their phone says “do I need a lawyer if I got hit by a car and the other driver has no insurance,” not “uninsured motorist personal injury attorney.” These longer queries do not always show volume in keyword tools, but they represent real people with real intent. If your practice area pages and blog content match these conversational patterns, you capture traffic your competitors never see.

Your most underused keyword research source is your own intake data. Call recordings, intake form responses, chat transcripts, and the questions prospects ask during consultations contain the exact language your audience uses. If three prospects in one month ask “can I sue my landlord for mold,” that is a keyword worth targeting regardless of what Ahrefs or Semrush report as its volume.

How to Prioritize When Everything Looks Competitive

Legal keywords are expensive in PPC and competitive in organic. That is the reality. But “competitive” does not mean “impossible.” It means you need a sharper prioritization framework.

Three metrics should drive your priority decisions, and search volume is not the most important one.

The counter-argument is worth addressing. Volume-first prioritization works when conversion rates are unknown and the goal is maximum exposure. For firms with no historical conversion data, starting with higher-volume terms and narrowing based on performance is a defensible approach. The problem: law firm conversion cycles are long enough that this trial-and-error method costs months of misdirected content production. By the time you have enough data to pivot, a competitor who targeted high-intent terms from day one has already captured those leads.

First, keyword difficulty relative to your current authority. If your domain rating is 25 and the top results for a keyword are all DR 60+ sites with hundreds of backlinks, that keyword is not realistic in the near term. Focus on terms where the ranking sites have authority within reach of your own, or where the content quality in the current top results is clearly weak. Both Ahrefs and Semrush provide keyword difficulty scores, though they measure different things. Ahrefs focuses heavily on backlink requirements, while Semrush incorporates additional ranking factors. According to multiple industry comparisons as of early 2026, Semrush tends to have a slight edge in US-based search volume accuracy, while Ahrefs often provides more precise keyword difficulty scoring. Neither is definitive. Use them as directional tools, not absolute truth, and validate against what you actually see in the search results.

Second, conversion potential. A keyword with 50 monthly searches that represents a person ready to hire is worth more than a keyword with 5,000 monthly searches from people writing a college paper. “Best DUI lawyer in Denver” at 90 searches per month will generate more revenue than “what is a DUI” at 8,000 searches. Conversion potential is hard to measure in tools, but you can estimate it from the modifier pattern. Keywords containing “lawyer,” “attorney,” “near me,” “cost,” “hire,” and “consultation” signal higher buying intent.

Third, topical authority fit. A keyword is easier to rank for when you already have related content establishing your site as a relevant source. If you have ten pages about personal injury law and zero about immigration law, an immigration keyword of equivalent difficulty will be harder for your site to rank because Google does not yet associate your domain with that topic. We cover how topical authority works in Google’s evaluation of legal content clusters in a separate post — the mechanics deserve their own treatment.

This produces a tiered list. Tier one: high conversion potential, achievable difficulty, fits your existing authority. These get content first. Tier two: high conversion but more competitive. These need supporting content built first. Tier three: informational keywords that build topical authority for the terms in tiers one and two. These are strategic investments, not direct revenue generators.

Do this now: open Google Search Console, go to Performance, and sort your queries by clicks. Find your top five organic queries. For each one, check: is there a dedicated page targeting that keyword, or is the traffic landing on a page that targets something else? If traffic is landing on mismatched pages, you have found your first prioritization win — building or optimizing a page specifically for that query will almost certainly improve both rankings and conversions.

Your Tools Are Lying to You (Partially)

Here is the part nobody wants to hear.

Keyword research tools are essential. They are also unreliable in specific ways that matter for legal verticals.

Search volume data across all major tools is an estimate, not a measurement. Google Keyword Planner groups similar keywords together and reports a single volume range for the cluster, which means the number you see for “car accident lawyer Houston” might include volume from “Houston car accident attorney” and “auto accident lawyer Houston TX.” Third-party tools like Ahrefs and Semrush use clickstream data and proprietary models to estimate volume independently, but testing consistently shows both inflate actual traffic potential, sometimes by a factor of two or more. Both platforms maintain keyword databases covering billions of terms across hundreds of countries — the exact numbers shift as each tool expands its crawl — but neither database is comprehensive. Semrush tends to offer stronger US-specific coverage, while Ahrefs has historically indexed more international keywords. The practical takeaway: cross-reference both when volume estimates for a legal keyword seem unusually low or high.

What this means in practice: do not reject a keyword solely because a tool says it gets 30 searches per month. That number could be understated, and even if accurate, 30 searches per month from people looking to hire a lawyer in your city is a valuable audience.

Free Alternatives That Cover Most of the Process

The data sources tools miss entirely are often the most valuable for law firms. Google Search Console shows the actual queries people used to find your site — and it is free. If you do not have the budget for Ahrefs or Semrush, Search Console’s Performance report combined with Google Keyword Planner (also free with a Google Ads account) covers roughly 70% of the keyword research process for a local law firm. You lose competitor keyword analysis and difficulty scoring, but you gain the only first-party search data that exists. If you are getting impressions for a query you have not specifically targeted, that is a signal worth acting on. Intake call analysis, as mentioned earlier, surfaces language tools cannot detect. Google’s “People Also Ask” boxes reveal the follow-up questions your audience has, which translate directly into content topics and long-tail keyword opportunities.

Mapping Keywords to Pages (Without Creating Problems)

Every keyword needs a home, and no two keywords should share the same home if they target the same intent and audience. This is where content cannibalization starts, and it is one of the most common structural problems on law firm websites.

The mapping logic is intent-driven. A transactional keyword like “personal injury lawyer Austin” belongs on a practice area page. An informational keyword like “what to do after a car accident in Texas” belongs on a blog post. A commercial keyword like “personal injury lawyer cost Austin” could go either way, but typically works best as a dedicated section on the practice area page or as a standalone blog post that links back to the practice area page.

The mapping document itself is simple: a spreadsheet with columns for keyword, monthly volume estimate, intent type, assigned URL, and status. Before any new content is written, check the map. If the keyword is already assigned, the new content needs a different angle or should not exist. If two existing pages target the same keyword, you have a cannibalization problem that needs resolving before adding more content.

For multi-practice firms, the mapping also prevents cross-practice area overlap. “How much does a lawyer cost” could apply to family law, criminal defense, or personal injury. The map forces a decision: which practice area page or blog post owns this keyword? The others can address it tangentially but should not target it as a primary keyword.

Treat this document as a living reference, not a one-time creation. Update it every time content is published, and audit it quarterly as new Search Console data reveals shifts in which pages Google associates with which queries. Keyword mapping and cannibalization prevention are directly connected — the cannibalization post walks through how these collisions happen and how to resolve them — and both deserve to be treated as core operational processes. The keyword map also feeds your topical authority strategy: when you can see which clusters have ten supporting pages and which have two, you know where to invest next. Our topical authority post covers how that cluster architecture translates into competitive rankings.

How to know your keyword research is working: track two numbers in Google Search Console monthly. First, total impressions for your target keyword list — this tells you whether Google is associating your pages with the right queries. Second, average position for your highest-priority transactional keywords. If impressions are rising and average position is trending downward (closer to 1), your targeting is aligned. If impressions rise but position stays flat or worsens, you may be targeting keywords your site cannot yet compete for, and the prioritization framework above needs recalibration.

Keyword research is a first-30-days activity. You do not need every keyword mapped before you start producing content, but you need the map in place before the second piece goes live. Without it, every new page is a guess — and guesses compound into the kind of structural problems that take months to untangle.

Skip the map, and you spend weeks untangling problems that five minutes of checking would have prevented.